Call centers are known in which incoming calls are routed to one of a plurality of agents. For example, the call center might provide help desk facilities for a particular group of products. Customers are able to call in and be allocated to an agent who has the necessary skills to deal with the customer's query. Each agent has one or more skills, for example, a particular agent has knowledge about sales for product X and about technical support for product Y. An incoming call is received and information from that call used by the call center, together with information about the agents, in order to route the incoming call to an agent with the appropriate skill. For example, an interactive voice response system (IVR system) may be used to find out what type of agent skill is required. Associated with each skill is a queue into which incoming calls are placed until an agent with that skill becomes available.
The terms “call center” and “contact center” as used herein are not intended to be restricted to situations in which telephone calls are made to the center. Other types of call or contact are also envisaged, such as email, fax, SMS, chat, web access, video access and any other suitable method of contact including conventional telephone calls and voice over internet protocol telephone calls. Similarly, the terms “call” and “contact” as used herein are not intended to be restricted to conventional telephone calls but include contacts made by email, fax, voice over IP and any other suitable medium.
As mentioned above, a contact center typically uses a “treatment system” such as an IVR system or other system for providing a service to incoming calls. For example, this might be a system for playing recorded announcements, streaming video, or sending automatic email replies to customers. Other options include music on hold systems and systems for sending automatic replies in other media.
One problem faced by contact center providers is how to most effectively balance limited contact center resources against the need to provide good customer service. For example, the number of agents available at the contact center and their particular skills affects the number of contacts that the center can deal with at any one time. The particular skills of the agents affects how well the agents are able to deal with individual customer contacts. The more agents that are provided the higher the costs for the contact center provider and so there is a need to find a balance between the resources provided and the customer service quality required. This applies to other contact center resources besides agents. For example, the bandwidth required between contact center entities to enable those entities to communicate and the resources of the treatment system.
Consider the situation in which the treatment system plays streaming video to the end user or customer. Streaming video is relatively bandwidth intensive and thus costly. This also applies for other media as well as video.
Contact Center providers often find it difficult to procure and maintain agents that can fulfil the skillsets required to deliver required services. This is a particular problem the more remote the end user is from the contact center and its agents.
For example, the native language of personnel at the contact center is likely to be different from that of the end user or customer the more remote the contact center is. Cultural differences between the customers and the contact center agents are also likely to be greater and the contact center agents are unlikely to have local knowledge about the geographical region in which the customer is located. Previously it has been suggested to use a plurality of contact centers networked together. For example, U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/471,143 filed on Dec. 23, 1999 and also assigned to Nortel Networks Limited describes a plurality of call centers in a communications network. There is a need to route calls between the call centers, for example, for load balancing, if a suitable agent is not available at a particular call center, or if the queue time at some call centers is unacceptable. In that system, each call center in the network sends call center management information to a network call center controller at a regular interval. The network call center controller evaluates this information and forms updated routing tables for each network skillset. The updated routing tables are then sent, by the network call center controller, to each call center. Each call center then uses the updated routing tables to queue inbound calls to multiple remote call center servers as well as locally. The present invention is also concerned with the problem of limited contact center resources, as well as other problems, but is not limited to the situation in which there are a plurality of networked contact centers.